Month: May 2014

Forget about that all nighter you are considering right now.
Even better, forget that it is a great idea.
Even better, forget about how much are you going to be able to catch up, and go to sleep.

I use to play the all nighter card, multiple times a week in the past, I don’t know it was the fact that I was younger or that I required less horse power the day after, but I was convinced that I was not only able to do that, but to be productive the next day.
With age, not only I am not productive the next day, sometimes take me days of recovery for a night of poor performance. There is nothing wrong with the days of recovery if you have an amazing performance, the problems comes when the performance is mediocre at best. We convince ourselves about how much we will be able to accomplish, and sometimes we actually do, but most times we just waste time, procrastinate and just loose our sleep.
I wish to say that even today it is an automatic behavior, it is not. I have been waking up at 4:00AM for a long time, even wrote a book about it (Amazon, Apple, Barnes and Noble) and had learn that those hours in the morning are maybe my most productive of the whole day, but in days that the level of satisfaction is low, I try to negociate with myself about staying up, one more hour.
I sometimes considered, even many times stay a little more late than what I should, but under really defined conditions. If I begin to browse, I go to bed. If I begin thinking on reading or watching TV, I go to bed. If I start daydreaming -as a form of procrastination-, I go to bed.
The cost of staying all night is way to high, I pay for it in the next days for sure. It is not that you stay later, it is that you understand those things you do that are not productive. Reading a chapter of a book to find inspiration to write, it is not OK, I sent myself to bed and rest.
Make sure that if you are going to make an investment in time -you will be sacrificing the next couple of days of productivity most likely and that it is a big investment- you get out of it the most value, otherwise, you do better going to sleep and waking up an hour earlier.

One of the biggest problems when we lost momentum is get it back, because even when we know it is not going to be the same, we insist on recover it. We want to recover the momentum that we lost and many times, as we discover is impossible, so we stop doing that thing.
Write daily on a blog is hard, write daily on a book is even harder. Write a blog and a book at the same time it is a complex work.
Sometimes the best thing we can do with those projects we love, is giving them space, discover if it is just a habit – even a bad one- or if that love we feel is in a certain way real.
That is in a certainly the story of this blog, it was necessary for me to let it go, even that I was hoping that it will came back and hoping to have again the opportunity to sit in here daily also. I knew that some will never read this message, but also knew it was important that those discover if they stop here because of a habit or something more.
This is not an apology, is simply a moment of reflection that you can even bring to your own life, it took me six months to understand that write this blog is something more than a habit. Took me six months to change from the habit to the need. Took me six months of missing it daily because I knew the momentum and the motivation was lost, but I also knew that I wasn’t looking to recover them, if I was going to return, I want it to return for something differnet…
The risk of lose momentum isn’t only try to recover it, even more dangerous is not try to find something new, something that with a little luck it is going to be more powerful.